Free Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson Page B

burned.
     
    New York was pulling itself up by its own pigtail. In those days, after the war, cement mixers used to trawl around the city, ready to jack their load at a whistle from a gang-man. Higher up, on the steel frames of the giant buildings, men with monkey courage tossed red-hot rivets into steel buckets. We were bolting together the future. Rich and poor alike, the rivets of a new world.
     
    I read William Wordsworth:'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,/ But to be young was very heaven.'
    I read William Blake: 'How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way/Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?'
    I read Whitman: 'I moisten the roots of all that has grown.'
     
    The streets. The cross-streets. The Hudson river where the cattle came up on freight trains. The smell of the abbatoir. The smell of cement. Hot metal. Hot bagels. Cold water on the new-cast buildings. The courtyard of our apartment block. The dark young men, deep eyed, nesting on the shelves of our bookstore. Mama in her dress of red polka dots outside the WoolworthBuilding. The long coats of the old Russian Jews. Fresh grated horseradish. Schapiro's 'Wines you can almost cut with a knife'. Papa's yellowing copies of the Jewish Daily Forward. Our upright piano. The chauffeurs dressed in double-breasted jackets and leather leggings in Central Park. Papa, walking, walking, the twelve and a half miles along, two and a half miles wide of this Aladdin island where anyone might be lucky enough to turn up a magic lamp.
    Papa's friends were in the Lower East Side, piled-up streets of Jewish busyness, where thin men with dybbuks in their eyes gave me challah bread to eat while they sold water-stained books to Papa, who carried them to the store in a huge carpet bag.
    Mama's friends on the Upper East Side, all Germans, with unfinishable supplies of pea and ham broth and whopper sausage. Mama in her neat feather hat and buttoned suit. Mama and her secret promise that one day we would go back to Vienna or maybe Berlin.
     
    The years fold up neatly into single images, single words, and what went between was like a glue or a resin that held the important things in place, until, now, later, when they stand alone, the rest decayed, leaving certain moments as time's souvenirs.
    Should it daunt me that the things I thought would be important, my list of singularities and tide marks, is as useless as the inventory of a demolished house? I no longer recognise the urgency of my old diaries with their careful recording of what mattered. What I wrote down is in another person's handwriting. What has held me are the things I did not say, the things I put away. What returns, softly, or in floods, disturbs me by its newness. Its vividness. What returns are not the well-worn memories I have carefully recorded, but spots of time that badge me out as the dull red J did Papa. I am marked by those stubborn parts of me.
    Perhaps I did know it would be so. I remember walking with Papa on one of his dogged night leads, after some book or other, and coming up into Times Square just as the lights were switched off. Papa, guided by the Light Within, strode on unperturbed.
    I, in the second's translation from brilliantness to nothingness, felt the world disappear. And if it could disappear so easily, what was it?
    'Shadows, signs, wonders,' said Papa.
     
    I read Whitman: 'The sense of what is real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal.'
     
    Against Papa's Kabbalah, his worship at the Temple Emanu-el on
Fifth Avenue
    , his strange friendships and the visits of the cantors, Mama set her Germanness. She was not a mystic, though her real quarrel with Papa's more arcane experiments was that he undertook them in her saucepans. She did not want to fry her latkes over the remains of a potion to restrain klippot (demons, shells, evil husks, whatever separates man from G-d).
    Her father had been a butcher, a lapsed Catholic turned cleaver atheist, 'When I chop